Our new season finally got underway as we played host to Skelmersdale. Whilst on paper the opposition had lower grades then us we knew from experience not to take them lightly, we have dropped points against this tricky side before!
The first board to finish was Alex on board 5. Lee Walls from Skelmersdale managed to win material early on in a French defence with a Queens raid. I didn’t quite see the end but Walls obviously was able to extradite his Queen and hold onto the gained material, 0-1
After some time the match score was levelled, Marek and Paul Stanley’s game looked to have been close throughout in a Sicilian Alapin where Marek had the Black pieces. As the pieces came off Marek managed wo win a pawn with a sneaky tactic. Paul managed to swap all the pieces off barring a pair of bishops each and Marek managed to keep on just enough pawns to secure the victory! 1-1
Andy Coe soon put us in front, I didn’t see a great deal of Andy’s game but I’m told he felt he always had a bit of an advantage and managed to convert this well before the end phase of the game 2-1
This left (as is not so unusual as the undoubted slowest players) both myself and Rob as the last games to finish. I haven’t posted one of my own games on this blog in a while, but I will on this occasion as I think this was by far the most interesting. Gareth went for a rather slow strategy (I thought) of spending a bunch of tempo in the opening in order to trade off his bad bishop. Having allowed this to happen I felt rather duty bound to try and play actively to prove some sort of dynamic compensation in return. I therefore sacrificed an early pawn and then a Knight for some unclear longer term compensation! Fortunately this panned out and I managed to win on this occasion. I’ve put a link to the game at the top of the page in-case it is of interest! 3-1
McCarthy V Ellis – link for full page view.
Finally on board 3 Rob was the last game to finish against Paul Massey, this game looked to swing back and forth with Rob having an extra bishop for a phase but Paul had some dangerous passed pawns. With both players getting short of time Massey liquidated into a pawn up Rook and pawns endgame. Tragically, just when it looked like Rob may be about to hold the draw a dreaded blunder occurred with just seconds left on his clock. 3-2
A closely fought match played in a friendly spirit, good luck to Skelmersdale for the rest of the season.
